SHIELD, High-Priority FASERIP ALERT!!!

So I started running this...

Class 8 allied arch-villains have launched a full-scale assault on the Earth!

Modok has taken Chicago.
Ultron has taken Los Angeles.
Dr Doom has taken Washington, DC.
Kang the Conqueror has taken New York City.
Communications and news networks are failing but reports suggest that, further, outside the US:
Mandarin and the Hand have taken Beijing
The Leader has taken Moscow and
Madame Hydra has taken Berlin.

All metahumans eager to aid in the liberation of Earth should form teams of 3-4 Marvel heroes and submit a plan of attack for coordination below or directly to Director Fury via Google + message.

Be sure to include the day, time (PACIFIC DAYLIGHT, 5pm-6am), location, and 3-4 approved, licensed Marvel personnel recruited for your assault.

http://www.classicmarvelforever.com/cast_list/all.htm

Approved teams will be greenlit as soon as possible.

The counterattack begins _Monday_ this week.

The war will not be easy, this may be the beginning of a multipart crossover.

___

____

-In the prelude session, Brother Voodoo, Dr Strange, Hercules and the Hulk protected some kinda crystal tachyon thing from a rampaging Goliath just before Kang took New York City. Joethelawyer is a pretty good Hulk.

-In the first session, a crack team of mercenaries hired by the Kingpin consisting of Speed Demon, Jack O'Lantern, Hobgoblin and Electro managed to slip into the city under cover of darkness and rescue President Obama in exchange for a full pardon.
-During this session it was established, by vote, that Nick Fury was the Samuel L Jackson Nick Fury. Which means mission briefings are very loud and start with "Alright motherfuckers..."

-The presence of Speed Demon made urbancrawling occupied Washington DC for the missing president a lot easier (whoever did the Speed Demon write-up over at Classic Marvel loves the fucking Speed Demon), at least until he got knocked unconscious for 8 rounds by the mutant elephant that was trying to kill the president.

-Yes, the other villains made fun of him.

-Yes they considered just holding the president for ransom Hobgoblin: "Fuck Fury. Fuck him in his other eye.""

-Decided the president's endurance was Typical (6) but his agility was Good (10) on account of having been a varsity athelete and apparently still regularly playing and my surfer-girl pal once saying she saw a picture of him body surfing and he was doing it right. Calculating his karma score was so ideologically fraught I decided to skip it.

-Tomorrow, the Spider Man, his Amazing Friends, and the Hulk try to retake Manhattan from Kang, Master of Time!

Like GMing Cats

Game Time Minus 1 Week

"Thursday, 3 0'clock?"

"Ok"

"Ok"

"Ok"

"Ok"

"Ok"

"So...be there at 6?"

"Hey, there's a chance we'll actually start at 3. Right? A chance? Maybe? Possibly?"

"I'll be there at 6."

Game Time Minus 1 Day

"It's simple: we'll go to Malibu in the morning and then come back and play at 3."

"Uh huh."

T Minus 3 Hours

"We got up late."

"I am shocked. Shock courses through me as it were an infestation of electric eels injected beneath the surface of my frail flesh. You go to the beach and I'll push the game back a couple hours."

_____

(text)

"Girls late beach shocking I know blah blah game at maybe 5 maybe"

"Didn't I call it at 6? I said 6."

T-Plus 2 Hours

"Hey. Are the girls here yet?"

"Of course they are not. You could text and ask them where they are and when they're showing up."

"Ok...they are on their way home and say there had better be food."

"Alright. Let my girlfriend know their disappointment with whatever food is here will be precisely inversely proportional to the specificity with which they describe the food they want."

Complexities ensue.

"Pizza."

(Despite a 66% lack of glasses. The chart will need to be amended.)

Ordered.

T Plus 3 Hours

"Ok, they are still in Malibu and Frankie's dog is having seizures and they have to take it to the animal hospital."

"Mmmmm....................(terrible thoughts about the dog)........................Well, if they do ever get here, then we can just reheat the pizza anyway. But we aren't playing, I'm thinking."

"Now Izzy and Mandy want to know if I can pick them up on the south end of Sepulveda while Frankie goes to the animal hospital."

"That's...a lot of traffic."

"They want to know if Adam could maybe do it."

"Yes but then if Adam does it, we have to stay here and not do anything else because by asking Adam to do it we are, essentially saying, Yes, Adam, There Is Actually A Game Today And Your Reward For Being A Driving Hero Is We Are Playing And You Are Not Just Transporting Everyone Around For No Reason."

"Here is what is going to happen: they are going to show up and then be all eating and drinking and being tired and talking about dog seizures and you'll go 'So are we playing?' and they'll go 'Yes! We want to play!' and then Mandy will be really tired and it'll be really short and we'll play for like ten minutes and then you'll be like 'Mandy, are you ok?' and then stop."

"Your view has merit. However: I propose an alternate scenario--they arrive, the character sheets and minis and dice are out and there's warm pizza and strong drink: Poured. Ready. We don'thave an intermediate period of decompression, we just sit down and play. It goes."

"Mmm...fair enough."

T Plus 4 Hours

"Have a drink."

"What is it?"

"Whatever that wine you asked for was..Moscato? Here, have a pizza, this is you, let's go. So: you are here, on top of this mountain, the dragon's fortress is..."

"It's Frankie. Frankie is at the animal hospital. She can't drive. Somebody has to pick her up."

T Plus 4.5 Hours

"So: you are here, on top of this mountain, the dragon's fortress is..."

"I'm tired."

"Are we doing this or are we not doing this?"

"We're doing it!"

"Yes!"

"Yes!"

"We're doing it!"

"Ok... so..."

So the ranger convinces a pterodactyl to fly a monkey to the floating dragon fortress and the monkey ties a rope and the adventurers spider climb up it except with Izzy blindfolded on account of being vulnerable to vertigo.

Then Izzy finds and manually disarms a trap, some grubs get roasted and jackalmen are slain, but only after their cursed knives have inflicted unhealable wounds.

How To Use A Copy Of Gammarauders As A Post-Apocalyptic Hexcrawl Kit

I played Gammarauders for the first time yesterday. It was fun, but it took pretty much all of the entire universe of time to play.

Point being it's gonna be hard for you to get a game together. So what do you do with your copy of Gammarauders the rest of the time? Use it as a hexcrawl kit for your Mutant Future, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, RIFTS, or Gamma World game...

Bioborgs:

These are basically animal-based Kaiju with weapons mounted on them, used as armored units in the service of various Cryptic Alliances. Let's just get it out of the way that if you don't already have gargantuan crushbeasts bristling with cruel armaments in you game, you need to get on theat

The weapon cards:

Each beast has a number of weapons it can use, each of which is on a card. The weapons have a power number between I think 3 and 10 and some weapons offers immunity to another class of weapon (say: lasers).

So say there's a random encounter in your game: here's a bad guy, and you can pretty much pull a random card from this stack and there you have a weapon doing 1d6+3 through 1d6+10 (or whatever) and you have a possibility the villain has armor (laser-resistant armor, explosive-resistant, whatevs).

The hex tiles:

As you can see in the picture, each hex is divided into a stained-glassish patchwork of areas. These are: water, regular (desert?), mountain, city, and energy-pod zone (high radiation zone).

PCs want to know where they are? Drop the first tile off the stack down, "Here's what you can see...desert here, mountain here..."

All you need then is random encounter tables for each of these environments.

The numbers in the middle of the hex tiles:

Some of the hex tiles have numbers on them: 2-12. In the game you roll 2d6 to place energy pods, in your game you can roll 2d6 for whatever the Hell your players are looking for. When the tile that has that number comes up...bing! There's the mcguffin.

Chits:

The game comes with over 100 little cardboard chits. These are all the same size, and the faces have: soldiers (in 6 colors), hovertanks (in 6 colors), jets (in 6 colors), fortresses, fortress ruins, regular ruins, symbols of cryptic alliances, and energy pods.

So you put them in a bag, close your eyes, and pull some chits out: that's what's there. You can replace the hovertanks with, say, monsters, and the jets with flying monsters. You can also work the color code into it, but then of course at that level of switch around you're getting into the abstract territory where you might as well write your own tables.

The point is you just pull something out and, hey, that's exactly the thing, no looking stuff up, no mental translation, no nothing.

After Play Report

As usual, I'm amazed at the ability of this game to trash my apartment: Wasabi peas, caramel popcorn, chairs (where did we get all these chairs? where do we keep them?), hummus, Adam's dice--left on the TV table, beef jerky, miniatures: a half-orc, a lithe Werner Klocke vampire, Mandy's mini that looks like Mandy, a sneaky blue elf, a brown-skinned half-grey elf, a pointy-hatted wizard, electrical cords and laptops (their desktops are also a chaos tonight), bottles of Dr Pepper and beer, character sheets, a drawing Frankie made of a couch with snakes, every kind of pen, my ID (why is it on the floor?), empty glasses, several pairs of black shoes, Player's Handbook, a shirt soaked in Corona, plates. Izzy is hours ahead and needs to get her xp so she can sleep, Frankie needs to talk about dog training, Connie needs a cigarette, Kimberly needs to tell us about the sniper who attacked the swimming pool on her roof, I need to write this down so I remember it:

-3 halflings met, released, ran off

-4 goblins killed, looted, with 2 warhogs, warned by shriekers

-the party ends the session under the blue dragon's fortress, planning an attack

-the dragon is 10 miles away

A Year Of Constantcon And Some Other Odds and Ends

-As of July 26, Constantcon (that is: people playing games and meeting new gamers over Google+ videochat) has been going on for a year. In honor of its anniversary, there's now a calendar of all the regular open games. If you are running a Google + game of any kind in any system and don't have your player list locked down, go ahead and add your campaign to the calendar.

-Jack's random wizard tower generator is good stuff. Not a full dungeon maker but quite enough to get the wheels spinning anyway. Though naturally I wish someone would Abulafia it. And that someone would turn it into a split-column format.

-Received LOTFP's recent horror adventure Death Love Doom in the mail. Here is a brief, but exhaustively descriptive and wholly honest and useful review. It has spoilers so I made it all white and you'll have to highlight it to read it: Death Love Doom is an adventure that has a guy that shoots magic webs out of his dick and is not happy about it. If you're into that sort of thing, buy it. If you're not, don't.

-There's apparently a video game called League of Legends and apparently 32 million people play it. That's more people than live in Peru. Not really useful game info. It just quietly blew my mind is all. At least I'd heard of Warcraft before 1% of all people were playing it.

-Got a hit on this blog from "midget porn with santa's elves from 1990"

-Review of the Takashi Miike film '13 Assassins' (now available on Netflix.) by Frankie: "Oh my god, this so honorable!"

-All the monsters from Taichara's fantastic Hamsterish Hoard of Dungeons And Dragons blog. Free because DIY D&D is awesome like that. I remember liking the shadow monster in particular. Her stuff is always very visual, and feels proper exotic.

Meet My Special Little Snowflake

This is Senator Throx.
He is a Rodian--that's a Greedo to you (and to me 2 days ago before I looked up "Rodian" on Wookiepedia).

He has some cyborg parts coming out of his face because...because when you're making a Star Wars guy you want to somehow take advantage of the fact it's Star Wars but then if you're like me, on the other hand you don't just want more of the exact same Star Wars.

He represents Barhok, a planet Jez invented where mind-controlling Serpent Queens eternally fuck with each other.

(Jez's best planets are just their own thing, really, no more Star Wars than Dune or any other "Imperial" sci fi. But saying "it's Star Wars" provides a very quick and easy backdrop-download. Even if we never run into anything unique to the movies.)

How you end up as a Senator from a completely nondemocratic planet I don't even know but me and Jez decided he's like playing a double game: pretending to loyally represent the serpent queens to the Empire and vice versa but secretly loyal to neither and working for the Rebellion.

And I haven't played session one yet.

Hell he doesn't even have stats yet.

I have mixed feelings about Senator Throx, he's got a lot of shit going on and he could yet be dead mere hours in. A little wad of wasted plot. Plus he'll be fighting for attention with various hammerheads, walrusmen, murder robos and whatever other cantina of freaks everyone brings to the table. Trying not to get attached. But I like him already.

Such are the risks we take, I suppose. If I didn't care it'd be less fun.

Alan Moore's Superhero Warbox

Not everything called Twilight is all sparkly. One of the things called Twilight was a never-used pitch by Alan Moore for a war-of-the-superheroes comic.

If you have not read it and take nothing away from this blog entry other than that you should and can read it, then the sun has not set on this day without me having done a good deed.

As Moore says in the proposal:

"This central idea... that of a war and all its spectacular ramifications, makes it ideal material for a role playing game... perhaps the ultimate superhero role playing game. "

Now thems sound like bloggin' words to me.

I am not going to do up a whole thing like I did with the similarly contorted and sandboxable factional narrative in The Wire because:

1. I think it takes much less work to see how you could turn Moore's outline/proposal into an RPG set-up than a whole TV show with a plot and all, and

2. I prefer to leave it kinda generic so that I can later lift the skeleton into another genre or campaign if necessary

3. What am I, made of time?

Though that would be cool and I'd be all made of living sand like the Time Trapper...but I digress

So what I've done here is:

-Made a quick visual guide to who is where in the US... (assuming the Titans are in their Bay Area Tower rather than their NYC one just to spread things out)

-outlined Moore's plot events in order (that is: how things would go if the PCs didn't interfere), and

-added some notes on the bottom for changing the superheroes to other settings.

None of this will make sense if you haven't read Moore's original thing, but if you have and want to lift the set-up, this stuff might help you keep it all straight in your head.

Click on the pic to enlarge...

That little purple arrow is a note that Sinestro is on the moon with the Green Lanterns but my computer screwed it up. It's just a note so I figure no biggie.

Events (in order):

First two hooks:

1. Superboy to marry Mary Marvel (people worry)
2. Locked-door mystery in the ghetto

Contingent on event 1:

3. House of Titans and House of Justice and House of Secrets consider alliance
4. Blackhawk recruiting more Blackhawks for apocalyptic scheme
5. Constantine contacting every faction
6. Constantine pulls the lighter trick with Manhunter/Marvel

(Somewhere around here: Constantine acquires Moebius chair & melts down Gold)
7. Houses of Titans, Justice & Secrets attack Steel & Thunder at wedding

Contingent on event 7:

8. Aliens invade
9. Capt Marvel revealed to be Manhunter (Contingent on events in game)
10. Constantine arrives w/humans in gold armor
11. Constantine tells aliens the weaponers of Qward are showing up on the aliens' home planets

NOTES:

-Converting most superheroes to post-apoc mutants for RIFTS or Gamma World is trivial. D&D takes a little more work, but not much...

-House of Thunder: these can be lightning wizards or Thor types. Mr Tawky Tawny can be a Rakshasa, Mr Mind an evil psyworm. Same deal in a post apocalyptic setting.

-Superman etc are harder: he is kind of a crappy out-of-scale concept in a D&D context. Just some heavy Paladin? Man of Steel?

-Everyone in the House of Secrets has an obvious D&D version, they're wizards and demons and whatever.

-Green Lanterns=space magic=Lovecraftian cult?

-Moore's remaining Titans have a bird motif (Nightwing, Raven, Hawk). Maybe they are bird people. Cyborg is half golem, Changeling/Chimera fits right in.

-Joker is an evil jester/clown, Luthor and Sivana are crazy wizards, Catwoman is, y'know, a catwoman, Grodd is just a smart ape or monkey. The villains are really easy to D&Dify, let's move on...

-Blue Beetle=a bug guy, Captain Atom is a hideous mutating freak(?), the Flash is a quickling. The rest of the House of Justice is trivial to convert.

-The House of Tomorrow is cool, a bunch of time wizards with time-clones of themselves hanging around.

-The barrio can be Vornheim (House of Steel its ruling class?) or any Lankhmar rip-off. Constantine is a wizard, duh, Phantom Lady is an ex-spy, Doll Man is pretty much as-is only a curse victim rather than ex-shrinkhero, Uncle Sam is tough to translate--insane cleric?, Blackhawk is a kenku, Plasticman is a changeling, Congorilla another intelligent monkey, Black Canary an opera singer, Adam Strange a dimension-hoppping wizard, Batman is a vampire. The rest are trivial to convert.

-The House of Mystery (wizards) doesn't do much in Moore's story. They could easily be the PCs or their patrons if need be.